John Priestland

Just if I may add, because you both mentioned Paul Sinclair, and he is something of an inspiration too behind Unhidden.

So his book Night People records the incident in 1997 where he saw grey figures around his bed during the night time, had these two deep ash-filled puncture wounds in his back.

And I heard him talk at a conference in Manchester in summer 2023.

And he explained that when he went to Bridlington A&E department, rather than tell the casualty officer the truth, he chose to lie.

It was better to be thought to be a liar than to be somebody telling the truth and potentially risk a mental illness diagnosis with all that that entailed.

And I sat there in the audience and two thoughts occurred to me.

First of all, how very wrong that was.

We're brought up

with the philosophy that doctors are there that there's we're supposed to be able to tell them the most intimate secrets about bits of our body that aren't going very well but there's something about this ufo topic the stigma is so high that people are prepared to lie to their doctors and the second thing occurred to me and obviously you get this in person with paul the book's very well written but you don't get quite the intimacy of it watching him present uh in um

in Manchester.

He was moved.

He was emotional.

And, you know, I don't need forward looking infrared radar or special sensors to look a fellow human being in the eye and see somebody who's in pain or troubled or talking about difficult experiences.

And all I want to do with those people is try and help try and make things better.

And so that's why the central path, the people aspect of UAPs is so important.

And Unhidden fills that space.

There are people on one side focused on bodies and craft and secrets and tell me what's really going on.

There's people on the other side who go, no, it's all a bit more complicated.

It's about consciousness and it's about the nature of reality.

For us, there's this middle ground.